Four short links: 30 Jan 2009

Two serious links and two fun today, thanks to Waxy and BoingBoing:

1. EveryBlock Business Model Brainstorming -- Adrian Holovaty's project was funded by a Knight Foundation grant that's about to run out. The software will be open sourced but he's inviting suggestions of business models that would enable the project team to continue working on it full-time. Having used and created open source to show newspaper companies how to do journalism online, will he now work on an open source way for them to make money?
2. Infrastructure for Modern Web Sites -- Leonard Lin lays out what's required in systems and platforms for modern web sites. Perl succeeded in part because its data types were the things you had to deal with (files, text, sockets). Will the next gen of tools (the 'Rails killer' if you will) offer users, taggable objects, social objects, etc. as primitives?
3. Academic Earth -- takes open courseware from different universities and integrates them into a coherent UI. Transcripts. Slurp.
4. Love2D -- a Lua-based 2D game engine. I'm looking at it to see whether it works for me as the next step for 9 year-old kids interesting in programming games in my computer club.

Everyblock's Dilemma: How Do You Open Source Your Entire Site and Survive?

This morning Adrian Holovaty announced that he will be open sourcing Everyblock. Everyblock is a site that crawls local data sources, aggregates the data, and then surfaces them geographically. For instance I get an email everyday that alerts me to news, fire department activity, health notices and flickr photos taken within blocks of my house.

Everyblock is available in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, DC. The data sources vary from town to town. Here are all of the news sources available for Seattle. Unfortunately, our police department only releases aggregated information so I have to learn about our rising crime via news coverage (as opposed to SF's law enforcement agency). Wanting a clean map design the Everyblock team also invested the time in building their own maps using OpenLayers (case study) and Mapnik. I've embedded Adrian's keynote from Where 2.0 2008 after the jump.

They've also used their data to develop mashups like this NYT sponsored one that shows coverage of elected officials (NYC only unfortunately).

Everyblock was funded through a Knight News Challenge Grant and they've come crossroads as Adrian explains:

But now we've reached an interesting point in our project's growth: our grant ends on June 30, and, under the terms of our grant, we're open-sourcing the EveryBlock publishing system so that anybody will be able to take the code to create similar sites. That's a Good Thing, in that EveryBlock's philosophies and tools will have the opportunity to spread around the world much faster than we could have done on our own, but it puts the six of us EveryBlockers in an odd spot. How do we sustain our project if our code is free to the world?

What do you think? How can they keep the project alive and perhaps even make it profitable if they are providing development resources to the competition? Personally, I do not think that competition will be a major concern for them. They have mind-share with many people interested in local, civic data.

I think that they should be more focused on revenue and building traffic than potential competition. In fact it seems that they could try to route around competitive sites by getting other people to bring Everyblock to other cities. The team could offer the ability for people to create their own hosted version of Everyblock for their community. Let people do the work for them. This could either be a pay service or an ad split (assuming that Everyblock decides to try advertising and there is revenue to go around).

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